“On May seventeenth, I woke up and also felt like I shouldn’t go to school. I’d had a dream I couldn’t remember, but I woke up knowing it was about something very bad happening. My mom, of course, was like lol, is this a joke. You are going. And then we fought a little bit. I got to school early, met up with Amir in the library. His mom had also been the same way, lol, no, go to school. We continued storyboarding this movie, about a kid who meets an alien in the woods. It was deliberately supposed to feel like a knockoff of E.T., then midway through the cute alien eats one of the kids and takes off toward prom. We were bickering about the sequence, about my ability to draw the alien in these moments. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw a kid wearing a black ski mask and a black T-shirt. I didn’t even see the gun. Just the outfit was enough.”

Ayanna stopped walking. Felix stopped too. He gripped Ayanna’s hands but didn’t look at her. His head was turned toward the house they were in front of. It was decorated for Halloween: purple lights, a wreath with glowing spiders, and carved pumpkins with flickering lights inside them. On the porch, a garland of plastic candles dangling in the air.

“I pushed Amir down, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me, I think I heard the sound of the shot after some of the bullets had already hit me.”

Felix’s voice was shaky. Ayanna’s heart was in her throat.

“I remember thinking this is such bullshit. And it was dumb, because it was like the thoughts I had in class when a teacher was being a power-tripping asshole, it made me almost want to laugh that I could think the same thing after being shot. And I thought maybe I had saved Amir, but he was bleeding too. And then I knew I might die at school, and the rest of their lives my parents would have to deal with the fact they were part of the my-kid-died-at-school club, and my brain moved so quickly when I was lying there bleeding. I know I heard some kids crying and calling to one another, gunshots, people yelling. Someone kept saying “Mom” until she was silent. But it felt like I was trying to think every thought I was ever supposed to have. Amir was talking but I could barely hear him. I know he said thank you, I know he said we should hide but neither of us was capable of moving.”